Apple granted patent where carriers bid for iPhone service - Page 3

What if Apple were to become a: "Traditional MVNOs purchase wireless minutes in bulk from existing carriers and resell them to customers." in curtain areas/cities world wide. Thus affording them some control of the end user experience, ie low data rates, etc. So you would still buy your phone or Pad through your carrier but the data service may be able to go through Apple which buys the data/minutes in bulk for resale to their customers.

If Apple goes this route (which I think is a real possibility) look for them to sell the iPhone on subsidy and lock you into a contract. In this case, Apple's servers would just be doing least-cost routing of phone calls. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that this is where Apple expects to use those cash reserves they've amassed.

Missing the point... APPLE would be the carrier! Apple would be subsidizing their own product with their OWN MVNO service provider. They essentially would be come the first & largest true global carrier overnight. Honestly the article points out that there could be a bidding war which would "drive down" pricing.. however it fails to point out who the customer actually is in that scenario.. it would be Apple, not the end user. However in theory if they could make their OpenSim concept work for any carrier world wide, they could essentially have iOS use your geo-tag and select the carrier with the most available capacity at that time in your location. This would give them better coverage & better quality of service than any of the tel-co's could do on their own. Businesses would jump all over this if they could buy a phone that had a single rate plan with world wide coverage without roaming...

Also, this would allow apple to do features that other devices just wouldn't be-able to do because of carrier restrictions. For example, text as data. A txt msg. is 160 characters, which is only 140bytes with 7-bit encoding. Even the insane teen's who do 30,000/month would only amount to 4Mb of data.... VoIP or Voice as data. I used my iPhone 3G (JB w/ hotspot) to connect my iPhone 4 to and placed a 15min FaceTime call over 3G, keep in mind this was FaceTime with video as well as audio. Apple has some extremely efficient compression / encoding as the 15min call used less than 600Kb each way (~1Mb). I use less than my 450 min plan, but if their VoIP used just as much (~600Kb each way / 15min call) that 450min would only use about 18Mb. Apple could potentially provide a pure 100% data device with a flat rate with a reasonable amount of data use / mo and still be cheaper than what the individual carriers could / do offer. Also, the way apple is setting up FaceTime so it can automatically work on WiFi as well, switching to where iOS processes everything as data would allow customers to have unlimited service whenever they are on WiFi, while also allowing apple to still control the service as the functions of Voice & txt would still be transmitting through their MVNO server (may be part of what that $2B server farm is)

I'm sure if Apple did switch to an MVNO provider, they would likely embed all their devices, such as MacBook's with these connectivity options and offer pooled data plans so you can register your iPhone, iPad & MacBook Pro and have a single service plan that provides a shared data pool for all of your devices..

Well, at least we can hope it will work out well for the end user. one thing is sure though, if apple did this, it would certainly be a huge game changer for the industry.